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The San Diego Symphony on Thursday named a new chief executive officer to succeed the outgoing Edward "Ward" Gill, who has led the orchestra for more than a decade. Martha Gilmer, who is the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's vice president for artistic planning and audience development, will start her new job in San Diego on Sept. 24 for a three-year appointment. Gilmer has worked at the Chicago Symphony for more than three decades in various capacities. Her new appointment marks the second high-level departure from the Chicago orchestra, after Deborah Rutter stepped down as president to take a job leading the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in...

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The San Diego Symphony on Thursday named a new chief executive officer to succeed the outgoing Edward "Ward" Gill, who has led the orchestra for more than a decade.
Martha Gilmer, who is the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's vice president for...

Audition.
The word can unleash terror in performers of all kinds, but perhaps none more than musicians seeking to fill scarce symphony orchestra openings.
A fudged note, a slack attack, a harsh tone, a hint of hesitancy, a sagging pitch — any of these...

Janos Starker, a renowned concert cellist as well as a distinguished teacher and recording artist, has died. He was 88.
Starker, who died Sunday in Bloomington, Ind., had been in terminal care for the last few weeks, according to reports from wire...

Janos Starker, a renowned concert cellist as well as a distinguished teacher and recording artist, died Sunday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 88 and had been in declining health.
Since 1958, Starker had been a professor at the Indiana University...

R&B star Janelle Monáe will step in for an ailing Aretha Franklin at an upcoming concert with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Franklin was under doctor’s orders to withdraw from the May 20 “Corporate Night” fundraiser, according to the...

When my brother and I were growing up in the 1960s, my parents bought the book, “Great Negroes Past and Present.” Perfect for young readers, it was a survey of famous black folks in history. It sat on a shelf in my father’s study, and I would take it down...

Esa-Pekka Salonen, the former music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has won the prestigious Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition, a biennial award from Northwestern University that honors a contemporary composer's body of work.
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CHICAGO — When London-born Anna Clyne was 7, friends of her parents gave her family a piano with randomly missing keys. Undeterred, Clyne not only played that piano but by age 11 had written a few little songs for herself and a flute-playing friend.
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For the 5 Browns, a quintet of sibling piano virtuosos who will play Mozart, Saint-Saëns and Mussorgsky in Irvine, classical music skill is all in the family.
Many parents dream of their children mastering a serious instrument — middle-class homes...

More musicians are in the midst of a labor dispute and a strike is threatened, this time in Seattle.The union that represents the musicians of the Seattle Symphony and Seattle Opera is playing hardball after the management of both groups proposed on...

The quietest room in Hollywood may be the office where John Williams composes. In a bungalow on the Universal Studios lot, steps from the production company of his most frequent collaborator, director Steven Spielberg, Williams works alone at a...

The start of a new season is usually a celebratory time for an orchestra. But for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the past few days have been a major headache for management and ticket holders. Musicians with the orchestra have been on strike since...

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra said late Monday that it has reached a tentative agreement with the union representing its musicians. The agreement would end a strike that began Saturday.Orchestra leaders said that ratification of the new contract...

An injured shoulder forced Jaap van Zweden to cancel last weekend’s engagement with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But the Dutch conductor is soldiering on. Van Zweden, the current music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, has upcoming debuts with the ...

Mark Swed reviews the world premiere of a fragment of Shostakovich's lost and forgotten opera, "Orango," with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic and given a staging by Peter Sellars.

Lugging picket signs and instrument cases in front of the concert hall where they perform, musicians from San Francisco's acclaimed symphony orchestra went on strike Wednesday, causing the cancellation of at least one performance and throwing an East Coast tou